The slogan? As the sole of the man’s shoe reveals, “Lose the beer belly.” Lowe Lintas, Reebok ad, 2000 Or so we think: he saves himself at the last second, while the belly plunges to its untimely end. The protagonist seemingly chooses to plunge to his death to save himself from whatever this massive belly might do to him, and he careens off the edge. The final denouement goes for further weirdo-action-movie stunts. Clever ol’ belly takes the lift, the canny piece of flesh that he is, and the two characters end up in a standoff, belly now somehow astride a motorbike, on a carpark rooftop. He tries to escape into a shopping centre, springing up the escalators in desperate leaps. We see a bloke pelting it down the street, glancing behind him with fear emblazoned across his face, before it is revealed that he’s being chased by a massive belly. ![]() In just forty nightmarish seconds the ad, for those unfamiliar with it, follows a cinematic, body horror-esque chase. Instead, they looked to the everyman, and of course in Britain, the everyman probably has a sizeable beer gut. ![]() The idea was, Reebok suggested at the time, to eschew the aspirational athleticism that rival brands such as Nike and Adidas used to peddle their wares. The ad was, in fact, part of a hugely successful £4million campaign for Reebok, created by ad agency Lowe Lintas. And that taunting refrain: THE BELLY’S GONNA GET YA! But I could remember that advert in painful, visceral detail: the maniacal metal soundtrack the terrified man pelting it down the road the enormous, hairy belly. If I’m being totally honest, before this became an inexplicable earworm for me a month or so ago, I had no recollection of what it was actually advertising.
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